


leave the lock, the key is thrown away

by TolkienGirl



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Gen, Loss of Faith, after narnia, regret is a strange and many-layered thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-13
Updated: 2016-04-13
Packaged: 2018-06-01 22:53:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6539791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She was given a world, and then she had to give it back again. (There's a reason why Susan stopped believing.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	leave the lock, the key is thrown away

She doesn't tell them, but she does remember when and why she stopped believing.

The reason she doesn't tell them is part of the very substance of it, part of what she hides. Because Edmund could have stopped believing because of age and wisdom lost, but he didn't, and Peter could have stopped believing because the war raged on and left a wake of blood and metal and modernism behind it, but he didn't, and Lucy could have stopped believing but she never, never would.

But Susan.

Susan stops believing because it's hell, plain and simple, growing up again and never being more than second best. Susan stops believing because twice is too much and not enough, and why be a friend of Narnia when the door to Narnia is forever shut?

Susan was a queen. She was given a world, and then she had to give it back again.

What's there to believe in, after that? England suffers, but the hard winter is just a winter. There is no icy witch to blame. There is no lion to look for.

If she had let herself be angry, if she had let herself grieve, perhaps she would have held on longer. But Susan wakes up every morning, in a drab little flat, and she is tired.

Tired, before the day even begins.

She grew up once, at the side of a stone table.

She grows up again in a stonier world. And her siblings would not understand, and she would never tell them—that it wasn't for something grand or sacrificial that she lost her faith, it wasn't some flash of sorrow. It was the weariness of age before she aged, the feeling of being used and cast aside, and if Lucy would tell a different story—if Lucy would draw water from the stones and wash the world clean again—

Susan is too tired to listen to Lucy.

The only bright spots in her world are the high, sharp sounds of laughter, of tinkling glasses, of red on her lips and gleaming lamps in the night time when there is no sun.

It looks nothing like Narnia, and Susan is grateful for that.


End file.
